The Economics of Information: DW3 and the Case for Creating a Music Megasite

In recent years, the age-old library paradigm of every institution developing and maintaining its own collections has come under careful scrutiny--perhaps even attack--as issues of both budget and space have made cooperation among libraries and consortia essential. In a Web environment, this paradigm of individual collections is clearly insupportable. Web pages are not physical objects and where they reside is inconsequential. Moreover, except for those sites that are proprietary databases or subscription e-journals, there are no fiscal considerations for many sites. Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection has equal and immediate access to them. Hence, when it comes to Web-based resources, our criteria for collection development cannot be the same as they are for fixed media such as books, scores, periodicals, compact discs, and videos. Our methods and policies must correspond to the format at hand and the reality of our present environment. While few in the library community would disagree with this assertion, the enormous duplication of resources on our libraries' Web pages positively contradicts it. Librarians have not yet made use of the technologies and techniques developed to collect, organize, and disseminate subject content in an online environment.

The Current State of Affairs

Commercial information providers such as Yahoo! and Google have different values and priorities than those espoused by educators and the library community at large. They are, first and foremost, profit-driven enterprises focused on developing as broad a customer base as possible. Their databases are developed serendipitously, either by spidering (robots) or by submissions, and no attempt is made to evaluate or authenticate the content that these information providers deliver. They do not discriminate between information and advertisements, nor do they aim to facilitate learning. In spite of increased efforts of library staff in academic institutions to teach critical thinking skills and evaluative techniques, there are many in the library community who believe that libraries are in danger of losing their constituencies to the multitude of commercial information providers that now populate the Web.

The proliferation of personal computers and the Web have caused conventional publishers to lose control over what used to be their exclusive domain--the dissemination of scholarly information. Their traditional role as "gatekeepers" is being challenged daily, as the ever-increasing number of free, intellectually substantive Web sites demonstrates. These sites--published by scholars, academic institutions, learned societies, and others--challenge the supremacy of content providers such as GroveMusic, whose claims of authoritativeness and comprehensiveness are not credible where the Web is concerned. ¹

Nor can we expect such scholarly enterprises to function effectively as gateways to the Web, for they have neither the means nor the inclination to do so. The quantity and quality of well-maintained, intellectually substantive classical music links in Grove's database is small in comparison to what you will find in DW3 Classical Music Resources (see below) or, for that matter, with one of the better commercial search engines. And that is how it should be, because GroveMusic is not intended to be a portal, but rather a music encyclopedia with links to external resources. It is also an expensive proprietary database to which relatively few people around the world have access.

There have been numerous articles published in recent years stating the need for libraries and librarians to adapt to the changes in our environment, ² and there are some notable efforts underway to make scholarly information on the Web more accessible to those who need it. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) now has a working group charged with developing a plan to explore the feasibility of creating a "scholars portal," a multidisciplinary database of links to academically sound sites. ³ Established projects with this same objective include Britain's BUBL Information Service, ⁴ a catalog of more than 11,000 selected Internet resources regarded as academically relevant to the United Kingdom higher education and library communities...